E-Paper
Sight and sound as art
Granta explores film as craft from the writer's point of view, and as art from the film director's.
Granta 86: Film
Granta
2004
Cinema
Pages: 254
Price: Rs 395
ISBN: 1929001169
Paperback
Cinema as art ceased to exist for me after Stanley Kubrick’s death in 1999, made worse when, in 2001, Steven Spielberg made the former’s pet project, AI, in the most anti-Kubrickian way imaginable.
In more general terms, cinema stopped being art ever since the US became a hyperpower. The Hollywood monolith has been conducting Iraq-style invasions around the globe without any need for reflection. There is a guerrilla-type resistance by filmmakers in Iran, China and other non-Western places, but nothing sustained from an individual to form a canon.
Kubrick hated talking about his films, and it wasn’t just the obvious “the film speaks for itself” theory. Perhaps the possibilities hidden inside a visual art are orders of magnitude greater than the paths opened up by the word.
Which is not to say that one shouldn’t write anything about the movies. Besides the reviews that open a film, there are also interesting textual analysis of multi-layered movies. The best writings, however, seem to be about the past, when auteurs weren’t derided by lowbrow snobbery. The exception is Granta, the magazine of new writing, whose latest issue is on film.
A couple of points. Most of the features have been written not by filmmakers, but by full-time writers. Nobody writes specifically about a film, but about aspects related to craft. And there are quirky pieces that defy categorisation but appeal to general goofiness and fantasy — the trademarks of good cinema. Additionally, there’s original artwork by directors like Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Satyajit Ray and Martin Scorsese, among others.
One piece I enjoyed was “Rats” by the Dutch author Maarten t’Hart. He was asked by Werner Herzog to train rats for the 1979 Nosferatu. About 13,000 rats were brought from Hungary for shooting both upon a ship, and in the Dutch town of Delft, whose rodent-free municipality refused to believe that rats could be tame. More than the drama in the story — t’Hart finds the rats were transported without food or water, and so started to cannibalise each other, wiping out a few thousand — is the surreal shoot on the ship.
Herzog gave his unit no idea of how things would unfold, or where they would sail. The ship has no lights and gets lost at night. The unit crew begins to feel like the undead; but in hindsight, wasn’t that the point? Hurrah for Herzog.
John Fowles is an author who plays mind-games, so his “The French Lieutenant’s Diary” was fascinating on two counts. One, for depicting the long travails of bringing a funhouse-mirror novel to the screen; two, for showing that even artists are fickle in their judgement. Sample: the entry marked September 6-20, in 1967, states, Mike Caine’s “very far from being a fool about his job; and his behaviour between takes, when he is endlessly bothered for autographs and snapshots is exemplary”. Three paragraphs later, in the entry March 7-9: “Caine is excruciatingly bad… He seems to have no notion of how to react, let alone act”.
Thomas Keneally, whose The Tyrant’s Novel is now making waves, writes in “The Handbag Studio” about how he was ambushed by a Holocaust survivor in a posh Beverly Hills shop. The result was Schindler’s List. It’s funny and amazing. As Salieri says in Amadeus, God found a strange way to deliver art to his messenger.
Andrew O’Hagan does a delightful Emperor-has-no-clothes on Miramax; Shampa Banerjee writes about being the younger Durga in Pather Panchali; and Adam Mars-Jones pleads for more silence in films. By way of example he mentions AI, and how different (and better) Kubrick’s soundtrack would have been than Spielberg’s.
Which brings me back to the beginning. Now that cinema is no longer art for me, you must excuse me while I troop off with the kids to watch Spiderman 2. Do read the new Granta; it’s a delicious pleasure.
